


If at first you don't succeed... (Try. Try again.)

by sevenofspade



Category: Ancient History RPF
Genre: Gen, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-30
Updated: 2015-04-30
Packaged: 2018-03-26 12:58:02
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,919
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3851824
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sevenofspade/pseuds/sevenofspade
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gwen's mission is to stop Julius Caesar's assassination in the Senate. Shouldn't be too hard, right?</p><p>Wrong.</p>
            </blockquote>





	If at first you don't succeed... (Try. Try again.)

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the following [historyfest prompt](http://historyfest.dreamwidth.org/589.html?thread=38477#cmt38477):
>
>> Ancient Rome, 1rst Century BCE
>> 
>> Julius Caesar, _The tragic flaw of charming men is exactly as it seems_  
> 
> 
> I took some liberties with the prompt, but I hope it's entertaining anyway. 

Gwen arrived in 45 BCE half a foot off the ground and promptly fell on her face. Aw yeah, this mission was off to a great start.

She got up, dusted herself off and pointed her pendant at the night sky. The pendant was in fact a highly advanced piece of technology cleverly disguised as jewellery (because one couldn't very well go traipsing around Ancient Rome in full Time Agent gear, unless one wanted to take a very short walk followed by a very long fall off the Tarpeian rock, a fate Gwen wanted to avoid as she rather liked not being pancake-shaped) and let her know she was a couple of miles outside of Capua. That was a bit off, but still suited her fine.

She made her way to Capua.

In Capua, with dawn pouring down the streets, she finished faking the tablet and planting it shortly before Caesar marched into town. There. That should do it. 

_Whenever the bones of Capys shall be moved, it will come to pass that a descendant of his shall be slain at the hands of his kindred, and presently avenged at heavy cost to Italy._

Caesar would read the tablet and be more careful and he wouldn't die broken, bleeding and betrayed on the Senate floor. 

Gwen stuck around until Caesar had read the tablet. What to do now? She couldn't go back until Caesar had left the Senate alive on the Ides of March, which left her with a spectacular amount of time to wait. She'd told Katie she'd do her best to figure out who had held Mark Antony's toga when he had been drunk enough to puke on the Senate floor, but that wasn't for a while yet, either. (There was rather me bodily fluids on the Senate floor than Gwen would have expected such a fine institution to have.)

Hm. She could check out Pompeii. Vacation in Pompeii, aw yeah, life was looking up.

Okay, so turned out? Pompeii was boring outside of Volcano Day.

And Caesar had apparently _laughed off_ her prophetic tablet because he believed he had nothing to fear and the gods were watching out for him. The worst thing was, Gwen thought, if she did her job properly, he'd be right.

Also, her tablet had been a work of art, okay.

Back to work, Gwen.

She had got a couple of months left, so she set about establishing herself as a soothsayer. Given that she actually knew the future, it wasn't that hard. Of course, no matter how accurate she was in her predictions to random people of the streets, none of it got her any closer to Caesar.

And she was going to have to be close to Caesar if she wanted to deliver her warning in person and make sure the dude didn't die.

She couldn't approach Caesar directly, because he was, well, Caesar and wary of assassination attempts. Not wary enough not to get dead, but wary enough to be suspicious if she just showed up out of the blue. And that was even if she'd been allowed to talk to him, but she was pretty sure that would completely overdraft her 'time continuum ripples' budget (not a technical term, maybe, but Gwen always tuned out the science from Jess) and she needed that budget in case Caesar didn't listen the first time.

She could try getting closer to The Roman Futurely Known As Augustus, but there was distinct possibility that she wouldn't be able to remember if he was calling himself Octavius or Octavian or even Whatshisname at present, so that ruled him out.

This pretty much left Mark Antony.

Why couldn't Katie be the one on this mission, Gwen wondered. Katie was the one with the crush on Mark Antony that could be seen from space. She would know just the right way to approach him.

...And probably the right way to 'approach' him, too. 

This rather left Gwen in the predicament of wondering how Katie would react if she (Gwen) either did or did not shag him (Mark Antony). On the one hand, there was the possibility that she (Katie) would be pissed that she (Katie) hadn't been the one to shag him (Mark Antony), but on the other hand, if she (Gwen) didn't shag him (Mark Antony) then no one would be able to tell her (Katie) what that was like and that would just be tragic (tragic).

See, this was why Katie should have been the one to go on this mission, because then she could have just shagged Mark Antony and told everyone about it and there would be no dilemma.

(Except that Katie might possibly never shut up about getting to shag Mark Antony. Whatever. It wasn't exactly like she was keeping quiet over Mark Antony in the first place.)

On the third hand that Gwen was borrowing from the nearest passer-by, it was Mark Antony and even if Cicero was just mudslinging with his accusations of teenage prostitution -- which he very likely was, because he was Cicero --, Gwen didn't really fancy a case of anachronistic STDs.

But Mark Antony was still the best plan Gwen could figure out. Octawhatshisface didn't interact as much with Caesar at this point in time and he was a lot likelier to call her out on her bullshit and then where would she be? Probably facing some lions in an arena or some such.

Okay. So Mark Antony was going to get sick in the middle of the Senate about three days from now, which made it the perfect time to be right there with a hangover cure, proving herself at the same time both friendly and ale to tell the future.

On second thoughts, it would be better if she showed up with a spare toga, because banking on Mark Antony having a hangover on any given day was a bit like betting that the sun would rise.

And maybe if she told Katie who had held Mark Antony's toga, Katie wouldn't mind that Gwen hadn't shagged Mark Antony.

Either way, if she didn't tell Katie, Katie would crucify her.

Two days later, Gwen stole Mark Antony's laundry and promptly returned all of it except for one toga and a tunic. The tunic had fringes which struck her as odd, but what did she know about Ancient Roman fashion? Not as much as Katie, that was for sure.

Gwen occupied her time that she was biding -- was that even a verb? -- by braiding the fringes on the tunic.

Then Mark Antony ran out the Senate and started throwing up next to her. One of his friends -- probably -- rushed to his side to hold his toga. Gwen took a step back.

When Antony was done, he sat down on the steps and held his head.

"Here," Gwen said, handing him the hangover cure, "this will help."

"Antony, don't --" his friend started.

Antony chugged the whole thing in one go, something Gwen couldn't help but be impressed by. That stuff tasted _awful_.

"Thanks," Antony said. He turned over to look at Gwen. "And hello."

His friend just rolled his eyes and left to go back into the Senate. Gwen understood the impulse.

Dammit! She should have asked who that was, because she was pretty sure Katie wouldn’t accept "...Anonimus?" as an answer to "who held Antony's toga?".

She rolled her eyes at Antony. "Really?"

"Can't blame a man for trying," he said.

Actually, Gwen could, but she decided to cut him some slack.

"I do look like yesterday's laundry," he said, "but at least I'm out of there. Nothing like a Senate meeting to make a headache worse."

"Speaking of yesterday's laundry," Gwen said. She shoved the toga and tunic, still with braided fringes, at him.

His eyes lit up and he started undressing right then and there in full view of all of Rome. Cicero would have a fit if he knew.

"You I like," he said.

And okay, so maybe Gwen wasn't entirely impervious to handsome naked men telling her they liked her, but that still didn't mean she wasn't going to roll her eyes at him. (She was going to sprain something if she kept doing it.)

He took the tunic and raised an eyebrow at the fringe. What? Gwen's braiding was awesome, okay.

"That's not mi--" he started, then cut himself off and shoved the tunic over his head. He picked up the toga. To Gwen, he asked, "Little help?"

"You're on your own, buddy."

"Fine." Antony began contorting himself -- he was very flexible -- until he was looking more or less like a Senator that hadn't just been puking his guts out on the Senate steps. "How do I look?"

Gwen shrugged. "Not naked."

"More's the pity," he said and waggled his eyebrows. His face grew serious. "How did you know?"

"Mark Antony with a hangover? Yeah, that's a stretch," Gwen said.

"Point taken, but I've never needed a change of clothes before." His hand was twitching, as though aching to wrapping around a sword.

"Call it the family business," Gwen said, grateful that she'd prepared this story in advance. It was likelier to be believed than 'Hi, I'm actually from the future'. She sighed, like she was confessing to a deep, dark family secret that was also faintly embarrassing. "My mother was the Oracle of Delphi when I was conceived."

"Really? How did that work out for her?"

Gwen blinked at him. She knew for a fact the Oracle was still active at this point in time so surely Antony knew about the ~virginity~ requirement (no, but Antiquity was _fucked up_ , if you asked Gwen). 

"It didn't and now here I am," she said.

Antony nodded. "What's your name?"

"Spurinna the fortune teller," she told him. It was a perfectly good cover identity and she hadn't just spent weeks establishing it for nothing. And if Antony looked her up -- as he was sure to do, because he was not nearly half as stupid as he pretended to be -- there would be something for him to find.

"Until we meet again, then, as I'm sure we will," he said, practically skipping back into the Senate like nothing had happened. Yep. Not nearly half as stupid.

Gwen got up, stretched and walked to the edge of the city.

Okay, so she'd established contact with Mark Antony and he'd seemed to both like her and buy her story, which meant he was likely to back her up if she foretold terrible things happening to Caesar.

Still, it wouldn't hurt to have something more than Antony's word and the tablet backing her up, just in case. Probably just in case Antony flaked out or was too drunk to vouch for her.

You know, this kind of mission was exactly the kind of mission Gwen was bad at. Gwen wasn't the 'precision, tact and discretion' kind of person this mission needed. She was a 'blow up your bridges before you get to them' kind of person, so this whole thing? Really not her scene. But here she was and she had a job to do, so she was damn well going to do it.

It took her way too long to get to the Rubicon and then even longer to track down the fucking horses and by that point running around to scare the horses was more stress relief than it was fun. So Gwen ran and ran and ran and the horses finally decided they wanted to be scared of the idiot running around trying to scare them.

By the time Gwen went back to Rome, it was pretty much halfway to Lupercalia anyway. And Lupercalia was when she was going to have to try to warn Caesar about the assassination, pretty much in person. Surely a month would be enough time for even Gaius Julius Caesar to arrange for more protection.

Gwen had started plying her trade as a fortune teller near the temple of Venus, on the principle that if people were going to ask the god for help, they might not want to travel far to get their fortunes read -- or vice versa, if their fortune was bad, they might not want to travel far to ask the gods for help. (Okay, so maybe, possibly, Gwen had a bit of an arrangement with the priests, but she was still right more often than not.)

Point being, she was on friendly terms with just about every woman in the neighbourhood and most of the men.

At Lupercalia, they all got excited about Antony passing by.

"It's good to know one of us made it good," Fabia said.

"One of us?" Always, always use 'us' instead of 'you' if you can get away with it, the people at the Time Agency used to say. Gwen had to admit it was good advice.

Fabia nodded and said, "He practically grew up with us, right here in the street. Where else was he going to go after his father ruined him?"

A fair point.

"Fabia!" Antony called. "You're as beautiful as ever!"

Gwen could see him, but she could certainly smell him (or at least she hope it was him, otherwise they had another drunken lupercali on their hands). She got up on tip-toes to see him and, whoa, he was very naked and very smiling.

"You're a filthy liar, Antony!" Fabia shouted back. She was smiling so wide Gwen could see her missing back tooth.

Antony drew closer and soon he was close enough that Gwen was practically gagging from all the perfume he was wearing. It did nothing to hide how much he also smelled of wine.

"Are you telling me you're no longer making more money than anyone else on this street?" Antony asked as he pulled her into a hug.

Gwen took a step back.

"Not as much money as you used to," Fabia said. By the end she was shouting, because the crowd was already pulling Antony away.

"I gotta --" Gwen made vague hand gestures in Antony's general direction as she took off after him.

Fabia waved her off.

Gwen ran. At one point, she even had to jump over two people fucking on the floor -- hygiene, people! -- to catch up to him, but eventually she did catch up with Antony.

And ran straight into Caesar, how fucking typical. They weren't supposed to interact directly with whoever's timeline they were affecting most -- and making sure some dude didn't get stabbed twenty-three (or however many that actually was) times usually meant he was the most affected -- so of bloody course she would make full body contact with him. She had shite luck, was what she had.

"Spurinna!" Antony said. "You look lovely."

"I do not," Gwen said. Couldn't the man see she was on very important make-sure-Caesar-doesn't-get-stabbed business?

"Could have fooled me. Wine?" Antony held out a drink towards her.

Gwen barely managed to restrain herself from rolling her eyes. She was on duty. "You're so drunk; I'm not surprised you were fooled."

"He might be drunk, but he is not wrong," Caesar said.

Oh shit, he was talking to her. This was really bad. Like, okay, sure she could talk to him; it wasn't that they weren't allowed allowed, it was that it usually made things a lot more complicated than they should be and tended to make things even more timey-wimey and honestly the only reason Gwen even was a Time Agent in the first place was... complicated, but wouldn't have happened if Jess hadn't been her girlfriend at the time.

So Gwen turned to Caesar and rolled her eyes back into her head. "Beware the Ides of March."

Then she fainted.

Well.

'Fainted'.

Antony caught her. Nice muscles on the man. He laid her down on the ground and checked her pulse. Then he explained to Caesar that she was a fortune teller and a fairly accurate one at that, so maybe he should beware the Ides of March.

Gwen 'woke up' around there.

"Ow," she said, sitting up to lean against Antony -- what? -- and putting her head in her hands. "Did I prophesy?"

"Yes," Antony said. "Now, if you'll excuse me I have to make sure said prophecy doesn't come to pass."

Then he dropped her unceremoniously back on the floor. What a dick.

Gwen got up, brushed herself off and congratulated herself on a job well done. Surely this time...

Gwen heard about Antony trying to convince the people of Rome that Caesar by no means wanted to be king from Fabia about a week after the whole thing had happened. Fabia didn't look convinced, one way -- "had that look on his face like it was all very tedious" -- or the other -- "if Antony says he doesn't want to be king, though..." -- and Gwen felt that probably reflected the feelings of the people of Rome.

The patricians, on the other hand, were probably too busy wondering where the hell Antony had hidden the diadem on his person to be convinced, which meant that Gwen's job was still not over. 

She was going to be washing the Ancient Rome out her hair for months. Speaking of washing her hair, she was really looking forward to doing that properly, in an actual shower, again.

Gwen greeted the woman who had entered her -- let's go with shop, because that sounds a lot better than 'place where she did business and sleeps under the table at night' -- fortuneteller's shop without looking up from her game of solitaire. When and if people asked, she told them it helped focused her visions.

"You are Spurinna the fortune teller?" the woman asked, pulling back her hood.

"Depends who's asking," Gwen said, still not looking up from her game.

" _I_ am asking," the woman said and this time Gwen did look up.

Oh, hell. That was Calpurnia, Caesar's wife. What did she want?

Surest way to know was to ask, so Gwen did.

"You told my husband to beware the Ides of March," Calpurnia told Gwen, as though Gwen didn't know.

Gwen waited for her to continue. She didn't.

"I did," Gwen said. She gestured to Calpurnia to sit down.

"He doesn't believe you," Calpurnia said as she sat.

Gwen gritted her teeth. Of course he didn't believe her. He probably thought he was invulnerable.

"Nothing I can do about it, is there?" She thought he voice still betrayed her internal monologue of "fucking hell I hate this dude why does he keep making my job this hard damn it all".

Calpurnia reached out and flipped over one of Gwen's card. "Perhaps if the omens were more... specific."

Huh.

That was not a direction Gwen had expected this discussion to take. Still, it never did good to look at gifts too closely -- maybe if Calpurnia had been Greek, but she wasn't -- so Gwen told her as much details as she could short of actually saying the words "Cassius and Brutus are going to stab Caesar in the Senate and it's going to happen in three fucking weeks _do something, lady_ ".

Calpurnia listened to everything Gwen said and then asked, "Is there more you wish to tell me?"

For a moment, Gwen was tempted. Oh, how she was tempted. If she simply told Calpurnia everything she knew -- said the words she'd been dancing around all this time -- that would be it, she would be done and she would be able to go home.

And then she would promptly be served disciplinary action of some kind, because getting Cassius and Brutus arrested was never her mission.

All of which, of course, depended on Caesar actually listening to reason and/or someone who wasn't him. Gwen wasn't holding her breath.

"No," she told Calpurnia.

Calpurnia nodded, once, as farewell and left.

Gwen went back to her game.

Three weeks later, she was playing another round of solitaire on the Senate steps. When people started coming in, she folded it up and waited to see if Caesar would show up.

He did.

Of _bloody_ course.

Gwen caught the shoulder of a passing kid. "Hey, kid?"

"The fuck you want?" The kid scowled up at her.

"See the dude in the fringy tunic?" When the kid nodded, she held out a note and continued, "Give this to him. There's a denarius with your name on it if you do."

"You don't even know my name."

"Two denarii and you don't ask mine."

The kid grabbed the note and ran off to give it to Caesar, who read it and didn't go into the Senate to get stabbed _hahaha just kidding_ he put it with the rest of his notes to read later -- probably during the Senate cession, even -- and carried on on his way.

Someone somewhere was clearly having a laugh at Gwen's expense.

Gwen marched up to Caesar, blocking his path.

"Spurinna," he said. "The Ides are here."

"They're not over yet," Gwen said.

The lictors pushed her aside and Gwen collapsed on the Senate steps. She was a bloody haruspex, didn't that count for something?

Apparently not, because nobody bloody listened to her.

Her wristband kept sending vibrations up her forearm. Fine. So she'd exceeded the amount of ripples she was allowed to use for this mission sometime around when she'd spoken to Caesar, so what?

She got up.

Close by, Antony was arguing with Trebonius. Yeah. No. Gwen wasn't letting that happen. She punched out Trebonius, putting her hips into the movement and all her weight behind the punch. He went down like a light.

Antony stared at her, open-mouthed.

Gwen grabbed the front of his toga and began dragging towards the Senate. "Brutus, Cassius and all the rest of them are going to bloody well stab Caesar if we don't get in there to save him."

Antony stopped trying to get out of his toga to get away from her. His face dropped and his jaw squared. Gwen let go of his toga.

"Are you sure?" he asked.

"Oh yeah, I'm sure," Gwen said and opened the Senate door.

Behind it, Cimber was pulling at Caesar's toga and Casca had his sword out.

Antony exploded into violence.

Gwen leaned back against the door. There. Everything was so much simpler when you didn't have to worry about rules.

Jess was going to have a fit.

"Are you done?" Gwen asked Antony a short while later.

Antony looked down at himself and smiled with blood on his teeth. "Yes."

"Good." She pushed herself off the wall. "Then my work here is done."

She took off her necklace, slotted into place on her wristband and turned it. The world dissolved into white.

To Antony and the rest of them, it must have looked like a bolt of lightning was bringing her home. Heh. Maybe they'd make her a goddess. Spurinna, Goddess of Haruspices. It had a nice ring to it.

And hey, mission accomplished. Sure, she was probably going to get in trouble, but at least that meant that someone else would get the mission of making sure Caesar named Cesarion his heir after his conquest of Parthia. Gwen was more than okay with that. She was done with Caesar and his stubborn refusal to listen to anyone.

Still.

It was true what they said. If at first, you don't succeed... Try. Try again. And again. And again. And finally punch people in the face.

Okay, so that might not be entirely how that saying went. Whatever.

She was done.


End file.
